Solid state drives (“SSD”) are becoming economical for use as bootable mass storage devices. SSDs are commonly fabricated to include flash memory devices, such as nonvolatile flash memory devices including Not AND (“NAND”) type devices. Composite SSDs (“CSSD”) are typically fabricated with two or more performance classes of memory devices, high-speed memory devices (and thus higher cost) as well as lower-write-speed devices (and thus lower cost). Such composite SSDs tend to be less costly than SSDs fabricated solely of high-speed memory devices. Because write access on mass storage devices is often localized, composite SSDs are able to provide high-speed memory elements that can be leveraged for frequent write access combined with lower-write-speed memory elements for providing readable mass storage with less frequent write access. Since the introduction of SSD devices, manufactures have typically configured them to appear to a computing system as a conventional hard disk drive (“HDD”). But there tends to be significant performance differences between SSDs and HDDs. As many SSD devices are fabricated using flash memory, typical write operations have different considerations than do those of a conventional HDD that can over-write invalid (deleted) data with valid (new) data at the same physical location on the disk. SSD write operations typically require a write-merge operation so as to merge the new data with other existing data of the same memory block into a new memory block. Such merge operations typically involve a block erase operation that can be slow and reduce the life-span of the device. Thus, unnecessary write operations can contribute to reduced SSD performance and/or reliability.